Ask HN: What RSS Reader do you use in 2022?

73 points by sbolt ↗ HN
With two posts on the front page on the revival of RSS I'm wondering what RRS Reader I should use.

158 comments

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Been using it for the last two years and it’s been great so far. Not sure if sub price would be justified for other people but for me the cheapest paid tier covers basically everything I need from a reader.
I pay for Inoreader as it most closely matches the Google Reader social experience for me. You can follow other users, share articles to your feed for other users to discover and comment back and forth. I always said I would have paid Google to keep Reader going, so I put my money where my mouth was with Inoreader. I do find it’s search capabilities somewhat lacking tho. Mobile app is decent, desktop website is great.
Yes for inoreader. Not free, but works well for me
There's a free tier with ads which I don't mind since they're non-intrusive (I honestly can't tell when the last time I noticed an ad was, and I use it daily).
I’ve been using Inoreader pro for 3+ years now. Much better than freely imho. And helps me get headlines quickly
I use Inoreader as well.

They run annual Black Friday specials that end up giving you 18 months for the cost of 12.

They have advanced filtering and rules.

They have some social features I don't use but that approximate what Google Reader was mourned for.

I really rather wholeheartedly recommend them.

The only negative thing I could say about them is that they seem rather close-minded in a rather non-P.R.-friendly way to feature requests, and don't seem very interested in improving the product in ways their customers request, although they do, however, still (slowly) improve the product. It's not in stasis as many other products sometimes tend to be (cough Remember the Milk cough cough)

That having been said, to me, the product feels rather rock solid as it is in its existing functionality, and to me, it feels like a solid power tool.

I went from Google Reader to Digg Reader to Inoreader free to Inoreader paid. Has been pretty solid I have only found one bug - sometimes it doesn't show you the same article you clicked on. Tried to report that but they wanted me to go to lengths to convince them it was not my browser environment - uninstall all extensions etc. Otherwise very happy with it.
If you are on Apple ecosystem, NetNewsWire is free, reliable and syncs between devices. You don’t need a paid third party service to use it.

https://netnewswire.com/

Newsify is also good for a simple, visual block news scroll. It pulls images from the source site, so it’s like browsing with a polished news app.
I’ve been using self-hosted TTRSS since Google Reader shut down.
Me too. I've been using the Bitnami builds. VM for ages, but currently the Windows app.
I use Feedly, not sure why it's not more frequently recommended.

https://feedly.com/

Feedly's great. A huge plus is that most mobile reader apps seem to be able to sync with it.
Have been on the feedly train ever since google axed reader, was able to transfer all feeds via import ++ will help you get some kinda feed (can break with big site redesigns but has been pretty solid) from sites without RSS. Haven't needed to shop around at all since 2013.
Feedly is fenomenal, its my 2nd most used app after email. I really love the advanced features of mute filters, web alerts and Leo - Feedly's AI Engine.
Unfortunately the iOS App has major problems for some users, see the app reviews. I like it, but as of now it's barely usable.
It has a 4.6 rating which is good, especially if I can't recall ever being bothered by those automated rating popups.

I use it everyday and works fine, "some" might be a small but vocal group? Might not be representative for a common user.

Is it? iOS reviews to work like Amazon.,, a 4.5 is an F
I haven’t had any major issues, but on the iPad the navigation is sometimes in limbo. I believe this is caused by using the keyboard/touchpad instead of touch.
I don't know about ios, but on Android there's a program called "Palabre" that lets you log into feedly. I like the interface, precache + readability features much more.
I also use feedly and love it. It is basically my startpage to the web. It also replaces all social media news feeds for me.
59 MB Android app. No, thanks.
I use Feedly Classic which is clocking in at around 37 MB. But I am looking at the other apps on my phone and the majority of them (maybe 90% roughly estimating) are well over 59 MB. Chrome, for example, is almost half a gig. What device are you using that 59 MB is an issue and are you also eschewing all the other apps that are that big or larger?
One more vote for feedly from me! One of the few online subscriptions I don't mind at all paying for. I especially like the ability to auto-generate email addresses for newsletters to "turn them into" RSS feeds within feedly.
I use my own RSS-to-Email service https://feedmail.org/. I've written about my setup and why I prefer RSS-to-Email on my blog nearly a decade ago https://kevincox.ca/2013/06/27/email-as-rss-reader/.

I used to use https://blogtrottr.com which I do still think is a good product, they just didn't quite fit my needs so after about 8 years I ended up creating my own.

I have used Blogtrottr since Google Reader went away, and I love it. It's great not having to check yet another app for updates, and all the filtering and labeling tools of modern email clients can be used.
Reeder for iOS/macOS
I'm also a fan. Been using it since v3 (it's v5 now) and it's great. Sync via iCloud on all devices, great piece of software.
rss2email + mutt
Exactly the same setup on my machines. Works fine and can be integrated with any other sync programs as needed. A flexible and robust approach to RSS. Newsboat is also a great option, for those who prefer a dedicated RSS app.
I've been on NewsBlur since Google Reader was put down. I'm still happy with it. Both the web and phone version are nice, and it rarely has issues.

https://www.newsblur.com/

Another one for Newsblur, since day 1
Same for me - sometimes UI changes aren’t good, but usually they were addressed
Yet another paying NewsBlur subscriber, from the earliest days. I use them to subscribe to hundreds of RSS feeds.

I've been increasingly using their search feature, which allows you to search for text across a "folder" (group of subscriptions) or across all your subscriptions.

Another nice feature: If you enter just the home URL for a web site when creating a new subscription, it'll automatically search commonly used URLs (/feed, /rss, etc.) to find their RSS feed for you.

Switched to NewsBlur when google reader was shut down… It’s so much better than I could have imagined GReader ever becoming. Used it daily for years!
Feedbin for sync and for email ingest. A key fact about this is that unlike Feedly and Newsblur, it keeps old content indefinitely. That means that if I don't check feeds for a while, or something is too heavy to read one month, I don't lose it forever.

iOS: Unread, which is just supremely beautiful. I'm amazed that the "double tap to mark read/unread" interaction isn't standard.

Mac: Reeder, which is nice and flexible though not perfect.

Miniflux. I'm incredibly happy with how simple and usable it is. I mostly use it as a PWA on my phone.

https://miniflux.app/

I also use miniflux but not as pwa. What changes if you use it as a pwa?
Not much. It just has its own button on the home screen (iOS) and behaves (mostly) like a native app. A browser bookmark would work as well.

Miniflux is designed to work well on a small screen with touch input. So the fact that, unlike some other options, it doesn't have a native app is not too much of a limitation.

I suspect that’s because most “native apps” are really just web views running spas
I really like miniflux, but I really wish it had a weighted post ordering rather than a simple chronological ordering. I posted a feature request about this earlier this year[0], but the gist is this:

If you subscribe to some feeds that post 100+ times a day (like a major news outlet) and others that post only once every couple months or so (like many personal blogs), you'll never catch the latter because those posts are always drowned in a sea of the former. Reddit deals with this problem by weighting posts from each subreddit you subscribe to so that your frontpage contains content from as many of your subs as possible.

All I want for Christmas is for this idea to get some traction. Hoping to make the time to hack on this myself Q1 of next year.

[0]: https://github.com/miniflux/v2/issues/1493

I've had a few feature ideas too. I'm currently paying for the hosted instance of Miniflux, but it's nice to know that self-hosting a personal fork with the exact feature set I want is incredibly easy: small code base, single executable, minimal dependencies.
It's a tricky idea to implement in a way that doesn't violate the "principle of least surprise".

Personally, I "solve" this problem with existing settings by excluding NPR/NYT/New Yorker from my global unread feed. They belong to a category (/news) that I can choose to visit if I want to. I find myself not visiting it that often, personally.

That being said, I have thought of implementing something like this. Maybe something that "aggregates" posts into 24 hour buckets, so they'll still show up in your global feed, but won't occupy 80% of the screen space any more.

Curious to hear your thoughts on these ideas.

Feedly on the web, and Reeder or NetNewsWire on mobile. I keep meaning to try Unread as well.

Both of the mobile options integrate with Feedly for sync'd read/unread status, etc.

I use netnewswire because I'm in the Apple ecosystem.

https://netnewswire.com/

Net News Wire is awesome, both iPhone and Mac apps are really nicely done.
Also using NetNewsWire, combined with Feedbin. It works flawlessly across all of my Apple devices, macOS and iOS.
Beautiful native apps.

Works great with self-hosted FreshRSS.

Possibly my favorite software release of 2022!

I seem to be the only person who doesn’t like NetNewsWire. The fact that you still can’t configure global settings that cover all feeds makes it useless for me.
Same here. It’s great, one of the best apps of any kind.
Also a happy NNW user. I'd been using Feedbin, which is also good, but since I'm a Mac and iOS user, I switched to using NNW with iCloud syncing, which has been working great. It's so nice to have fully-native apps!
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Feedly; i'm lazy and that was where i landed after google reader went pow
Newsboat[1].

Having everything happen locally on my own machine is great - I never want to be in the position of losing Google Reader again. And the option to do non-interactive refresh makes is almost as nice for high volume feeds.

---

1. https://newsboat.org/

I use “Reeder” - http://reederapp.com

I connect/subscribe it to various things - one of which is a previously curated FreshRSS instance, running in a docker container. So reeder connects and updates read/new feed additions too.

Same here. Reeder across all my Apple gear. I haven’t found anything anywhere as nice for Fedora or Windows.

200+ feeds, using it since 1.0.

Reeder for iOS with a Feedbin subscription. This combination has worked perfectly for years.
I used to use Reeder/Feedbin but I moved to NetNewsWire/Feedbin when they started updating NNW again. I like NNW a bit better.
feedbro browser extension is pretty powerful
I use NetNewsWire these days, but for anyone who wants to dabble in RSS with minimal investment, I highly recommend FeedBro, a well-executed Firefox add-on.

It has a highly customizable UI.

It handles all the fetching/refreshes/storage right in your browser, no need to install anything else or self-host a backend.

And you can import/export OPML feed collections, so you can easily switch to another solution when you outgrow it.

The only downside I've found: it doesn't sync between machines (at least, not for free). That's totally fine when you're just trying out RSS for the first time, but it does get annoying if you eventually want to read on, say, a phone, tablet, and laptop in different situations. For that use case, NNW + FreshRSS is my current, excellent solution.

NetNewsWire can sync between multiple devices using iCloud, no third party service needed. It works very well for me.
I just use good old Thunderbird.
So do I, since I'm subscribed to a lot of email newsletters and it's nice to have them all together, but the lack of sync between devices is annoying
Can you recommend me any newsletters?

Thanks in advance.

I'm subscribed to Matt Levine's Money Stuff[0] about finance, computers are bad[1] about retrotechnology, and A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry[2] about history. The common theme through all of these is their focus on big picture systems, which I enjoy. I'm also subscribed to the Orbital Index[3] which is about space, and is more focused on small scale current events than the others.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters/money-stuff

[1] https://computer.rip, run by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jcrawfordor

[2] https://acoup.blog

[3] https://orbitalindex.com/